A sign held up in the initial stages of the demonstrations in Kaduna, Nigeria, read "Down with beauty." A strange message from protestors so proud of Islam, a religion and culture that cultivates the aesthetic in almost every aspect of life, that covers everyday surfaces from marble floors to brass hookahs with meticulously detailed ornament, that has created some of the most beautiful buildings and art in human history. Beauty itself is obviously not the issue here: It's a particularly Western kind of beauty, which many don't find beautiful at all.

The incomprehensible message is typical of the codes of this conflict, which are confusing to Westerners. There have been many protests against beauty pageants here in Canada, as well as frequent, angry denunciations of U.S. cultural dominance, but they don't end up in mass murders and the destruction of churches and neighbourhoods.

The statistics from the Kaduna riots are stupefying: So far, the Nigerian Red Cross has counted 175 bodies. There are at least 500 injuries, and 12,000 have been left homeless. The riots began after a newspaper called ThisDay published an article in defence of the Miss World pageant and suggested that Mohammed himself would have chosen a wife from among the contestants.

The offices of the paper were burned down, and Christian neighbourhoods in the city attacked. The Christians, supported by the police and the army, then retaliated and attacked Muslim neighbourhoods, burning down a few mosques of their own. So far at least 22 churches and eight mosques have been destroyed. Policemen and soldiers have since been arrested, on charges of beating and shooting unarmed Muslim civilians with no provocation.

Obviously this is about more than religious objections to female nudity. The pageant is an excuse to revive internecine hatreds that flare up wherever Muslims and Christians have to live together. Since 1999, when a civilian government took over from military rulers in Nigeria, more than 10,000 people have been killed there. The president of the Nigerian Red Cross has explained that the Christian population of Kaduna was in favour of the pageant, and sees its departure as a symbolic victory for Muslims. This is bizarre, since there is nothing particularly Christian about the Miss World pageant. (As a Nigerian editor wrote in ThisDay: "I know many pastors who cannot understand the essence of parading young girls like cattle, and I am also yet to see where such an enterprise, part of the perversion of the world we live in, can be supported in the Bible. . . . So in essence, neither Christianity nor Islam can be used to rationalize holding [a] beauty contest, the fact that we all watch it notwithstanding.") Of course, the Muslim hostility is not just to Christianity per se, but to Western culture, and in particular to the crass kind of American mass culture represented by idiocies such as the Miss World pageant.

The multiple paradoxes here are particularly modern. Even before the pageant started, several would-be contestants had refused to participate when they heard it would be held in a state that practises sharia, and that had condemned a woman to death by stoning for adultery.

Miss Canada has claimed that it was her intent to present the president of Nigeria with a petition. The Western press was amused at the idea of beauty contestants as champions of women's rights. Since the competition has moved to London, it has been described as a cargo of nuclear waste that no country wants to touch. Of course it's not the first time that feminists have lined up with religious fundamentalists on the same side of an issue. But since Sept. 11, and these deadly riots, condemning this Western decadence is an even more unpopular and complicated position to take.

Still, it's important to realize that even in Canada and Europe, the fiercest anti-Americanism is usually provoked by cultural issues. I can understand the rage that people who live in desperate poverty must feel at seeing their poor, corrupt city invaded by cameramen who are only there to photograph beauty that is completely Western-defined. It is entirely foreign culture, and its massive power is irritating.

It's also not beautiful. Beauty must contain some element of the extraordinary, of the singular. It must be startling. Jean Anouilh said that real beauty had to be grave; Albert Camus said that beauty was unbearable; Lautreamont declared that beauty must be convulsive. Whatever they all meant, it is clear that none of those adjectives applies to the blow-dried suburban niceness of the Miss World pageant. And this is why the "Down with beauty" banner of the Nigerian protestors makes a strange kind of sense, if you interpret it to mean "Down with this sort of incongruous, disrespectful cultural invasion." It doesn't mean "Down with beauty." It means "Down with ugliness." (Of course, I wouldn't kill anyone over it.)